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Alan Turing/Transcript
Transcript Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby Tim is hosting a television game show called The Wheel of Fortune. He is wearing a suit and tie. He consists of different kinds of robots. TIM: All right, welcome back to… The Wheel... Of...Fortune! The Wheel of Fortune logo appears on the screen. The 1st o in "OF" is replaced with a color wheel. TIM: The category is Common Salutation, and we're just one letter away. An animation shows a Wheel of Fortune-type board with boxes for each letter. A smiling female robot in a dress is pointing at the board. The letters on the board read, Dear Tim and Moby, with just the O in Moby missing. TIM: Would anyone like to solve? Moby stands between two other robot contestants. None of them attempt to solve the puzzle. There are cricket noises in the background. TIM: Really? All right, I'll give you a hint. Tim reads from a typed letter. TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, My friend told me a computer helped win World War II. Did they even have computers back then? Curious, Raffi. TIM: Hey, Raffi! World War II started more than 75 years ago. Back then, there was nothing like what we would call computers. But visionaries from many different fields were starting to imagine them. One of them was a British mathematician named Alan Turing. An animation shows Alan Turing, seated at his desk, typing. TIM: He came up with his idea while writing a paper in graduate school. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Well, in the 1930s, there was a big debate in math circles about whether certain problems were unsolvable. Turing came up with a novel way to test the idea. He described a machine that could read problems translated into binary code, a series of ones and zeros. It would scan a long strip of these digits, adding some here, deleting some there. When it stopped, the remaining code on the strip would be the solution. An animation shows Turing imagining the machine that Tim describes. A strip of paper is running through the machine, which adds and removes ones and zeros on the paper strip. TIM: Turing proved that, in theory, you could program a machine like this to solve any math problem. Any problem that was solvable, at least. A professor in a suit and tie walks up to the machine and examines it. He smiles and crosses his arms, waiting for the machine to finish solving the problem. TIM: His paper also showed how some problems could never be solved. The machine would just go on forever, adding and erasing ones and zeros, searching for an answer. The professor becomes impatient with the machine. He looks at his watch and frowns, then falls asleep on the table next to the machine. The machine continues to calculate as the professor turns into a skeleton. MOBY: Beep. TIM: The Universal Turing Machine wasn't an actual design, more like a science-fiction concept. It was just something he dreamed up to prove a point about math. Unless it could actually be built, it had no practical use. An animation shows Alan Turing riding a public transit bus. He begins reading a newspaper. Its headline reads: East London Bombed. TIM: And with war breaking out in Europe, Turing wanted to serve his country. MOBY: Beep. TIM: German air raids were destroying British cities. Nazi U-boats, early submarines, infested the waters around the island nation. They'd form wolf packs, hunting and sinking supply ships. Cut off from the outside world, England struggled with shortages of food and weapons. An animation shows a supply ship, seen through the periscope of a Nazi submarine. The submarine launches a torpedo toward the ship. MOBY: Beep. TIM: U-boats owed a lot of their success to Germany's secret weapon, the Enigma. They used it to encrypt messages, or hide them with a code. An animation shows Germany's Enigma machine. It looks like a typewriter keyboard, enclosed in a small wooden box with a lid. A Nazi officer operates the machine, while another takes notes. TIM: Encrypted orders could be sent by radio to U-boat captains. The officer with the notepad walks to a radio operator, who transmits the message as Tim describes. TIM: Even if someone were listening in, they wouldn't be able to make sense of the message. MOBY: Beep. TIM: The Enigma looked pretty simple on the surface. You typed a letter on the keyboard, and a different letter lit up on a lampboard. So, if you typed, say, S.H.I.P., it might come out as G.T.R.U. An animation demonstrates the use of the Enigma. A hand types the letters S, H, I, and P. On a screen above the keyboard appear the letters G, T, R, and U. TIM: That was your encrypted message, or cipher. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Sure, if the code were the same throughout the cipher, it'd be easy to solve. Like if all the Ss were Gs, all the Hs were Ts, and so on. An animation shows the message British Ships Spotted encoded by the Enigma into text that looks like random letters and not real words. Letters are highlighted as Tim mentions them to demonstrate how easy it is to spot a pattern when the code remains the same throughout the cipher. TIM: But the Enigma housed an ingenious system of gears and wires. Each time you pressed a letter, the gears moved, changing how the keys were wired to the lampboard. An animation shows the interior workings of the Enigma, which function as Tim describes. TIM: So basically, each letter in any message got a new secret code. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Recipients of a cipher needed their own machine to decrypt it. They would set its dials to match those of the sender machine. Typing the coded message would light up the decoded message. An animation demonstrates the process that Tim describes. TIM: Even if they had an Enigma, the British would need to know the settings for each message. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Nope, this was not one of Turing's unsolvable problems. But his ideas for automated computing had caught the attention of the British government. An animation shows British Prime Minister Winston Churchill reading Turing's grad-school paper. Churchill puts down the paper, picks up a telephone, and makes a call. TIM: They were assembling a special team just to crack the Enigma. It included puzzle makers, linguists, statisticians, even chess champs. Turing was asked to join them at a top-secret compound called Bletchley Park. An animation shows the Enigma Team, including Turing, gathering to have their photo taken. MOBY: Beep. TIM: The Bletchley team began with a huge head start. A group of Polish code-breakers had figured out the wiring inside an older version of Enigma. They built a decryption machine that automatically tested out solutions to a cipher. An animation shows a code-breaker working on an Enigma machine, along with a second code-breaker working on a decryption machine. TIM: They called it a bomb, probably for the way it ticked while it was working. The Polish team shared their machine with the British. But the new and improved Enigma had way more settings. An animation shows Turing and his team standing around a decryption machine, studying it closely. TIM: 150 million-million-mill, well, um, this many configurations. An animation shows Turing at a blackboard. He writes a number that begins with 150 and is followed by 18 zeros. MOBY: Beep, beep, beep, beep. Moby counts on his fingers as he beeps. His head explodes. TIM: Yeah, tell me about it. A new head appears from within Moby's torso. TIM: But this is where Turing's theories about computing machines were so vital. He adopted the Polish bomb to work with the newer Enigma, expanded it so it could try out way more solutions at the same time, and modified it to work much faster. Hundreds of drums clicked around, letter by letter, until the message was decrypted. An animation shows the gears of the Polish bomb, blending into the more intricate drums of Turing's invention. Turing and another member of his group stand next to his machine, which is as tall as they are. TIM: But by then, it was usually too late. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Testing out every possible setting took way longer than 24 hours, and with the Germans changing their Enigmas daily, well, Turing's team basically had to start all over every single day. Turing's team watches his machine at work. An alarm clock goes off, but the machine has still not deciphered the Enigma code. They all hang their heads in disappointment. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Instead of upping its speed, Turing made his bomb search smarter. For instance, they knew a letter couldn't be encoded to itself. Pressing a key would never light up that same character. Also, certain letter combinations simply didn't exist in German. An animation shows Turing studying a German-English dictionary. A member of his team lists on a blackboard letter combinations that would never appear in an Enigma message. TIM: The bomb could skip millions of settings that violated these rules. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Training bombs to search for certain words was equally as important. German messages often repeated key expressions in similar places. Weather for the Night, was how many of them began. A frequent signoff was, Heil Hitler. An image shows an encoded message, typed on a sheet of paper. Coded text in the message changes to reveal the phrases Tim describes. TIM: These common phrases, or cribs, refined the bomb's search patterns. MOBY: Beep. TIM: I guess you could say the machines were thinking, maybe even learning. Turing himself obsessed over similar questions. He's often credited as an early pioneer of artificial intelligence, the ability for machines to process information like humans. An animation shows Turing daydreaming. He imagines linking his own mind to that of a calculating machine. A GAME-SHOW CONTESTANT ROBOT: Beep. Tim looks at the small robot. TIM: Like I said, Turing was a visionary. He was an eccentric guy who approached things in radically different ways. He often wore pajamas to work and sported a gas mask while biking to avoid hay fever. An animation shows Turing in pajamas and a gas mask, biking through his neighborhood. TIM: Turing sometimes even ran the 40 miles from Bletchley Park to London for important meetings! An animation shows Turing running, holding a briefcase. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Nah, he didn't worry too much about what others thought of him. He was openly gay at a time when that was considered immoral. In England, it was illegal. In fact, Turing was arrested and convicted for it in 1952. An animation shows Turing being interrogated by a police official. MOBY: Beep. TIM: To avoid going to prison, he agreed to take hormone injections. It was supposed to stop his attraction to other men. The injections clouded his mind and broke his concentration. An animation shows Turing at his home. He is staring at a partly-eaten apple, looking sad and confused. TIM: He was found dead at age 41 with a poisoned apple by his side. It was ruled a suicide. MOBY: Beep. TIM: Yeah, pretty awful way to treat a war hero. Over the decades, members of the LGBT community fought to save his reputation. In 2009, the Prime Minister finally issued an apology, applauding Turing's service to his country. An image shows a public memorial to Alan Turing. An animation shows a woman reading a newspaper. The paper's headline reads: P.M. Brown, Sorry Mister Turing. TIM: By the war's end, his machines were decoding thousands of Enigma intercepts every day. An animation shows a museum guide standing next to Turing's machine. He is explaining the machine to a group of museum visitors. TIM: U-boat attacks plummeted, and the Allies learned key intel about Germany's overall strategy. Turing may have shortened World War II by years, saving countless lives. But his legacy extends well beyond that. MOBY: Beep. TIM: His Turing Machine paper was largely ignored at the time, but it became a foundational document in the budding field of computer science. Every developer, device, and bit of software owes him a huge debt. An animation shows the Universal Turing Machine, surrounded by a laptop, a cell phone, a hand-held video game, and similar devices. TIM: So, what do you think? Are you ready to solve this puzzle? The gameshow board now reads: Artificial Intelligence, with only the letter R missing from the word, Artificial. The three robot contestants each hold up a card with a different letter on it. The first hold up a B. The second, Moby, holds up a Z. The third holds up an O. Tim sighs and facepalms. TIM: No, It's an R! Category:BrainPOP Transcripts